With gratitude

Lately I've been making a concerted effort to keep a running tally of things I'm grateful for in my head. It's all too easy for me to focus on sad/bad/scary things (even things that haven't happened and probably never will--I'm especially good at focusing on those sorts of things), and forget that despite the sorrow and trials, there are some pretty good things happening in my life on any given day.

Granted, sometimes those things are small, but good is good.

So at night while I'm in bed trying to fall asleep, I make a mental note of all the things I'm grateful for. It's particularly fabulous if I can think of things that happened in the preceding 24 hours, but that's not a hard and firm requirement.

I make up the rules, after all.

I kind of wish I was one of those people who had to struggle to see the bad, but I'm not. Bad leaps out at me all the time, while I play hide-and-seek with good. But the interesting thing is, focusing on gratitude is making it easier for me to spot it on a more regular basis.

And that's good. Good! Yay!

Take this "Shimmery Hearts Scarf" from Red Heart, for example...

Right after I took this picture I had to pull it all out right down to the first row because I'd made a mistake.

Okay, there's nothing actually good in that at all, except that I didn't get too far before discovering the mistake.

The thing I'm very grateful for happened much later in the process. I thought I had more than enough yarn to complete the scarf (I used Caron Simply Soft Eco, which is made with 20% post-consumer recycled polyester--one scarf keeps one bottle out of landfills!), but my skein ended a little more than halfway through the border.

I'd mined the skein from my stash and I was pretty sure there was only one of them, but after a quick search through the piles I was rewarded with another full skein! More than enough to finish the scarf and make a companion hat.

I could have used any colour to complete the border, but I'm grateful (see what I did there?) that I found enough of the same yarn to complete the scarf the way I'd envisioned it. Just like this:

Note: the colour is actually truer in the first picture.

I'm going to donate the hat and scarf as a set through Hats Off To Liz, which is a charity close to my heart in honour of a woman I'm grateful I once knew.